Intro to Protective Strategies
by Ifwecansparkle
Summary: Jeff finds out about Hickey handcuffing Abed to a filing cabinet. He is duly upset, and confronts Hickey.


**Fix-it fic for "Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality," because the ending made me all kinds of uncomfortable.**

**Trigger warning for abuse.**

Something felt decidedly off about the study group, and Jeff couldn't help but notice. The dynamic had shifted drastically since the night he had played third wheel to Duncan and Britta (of all people), and it wasn't just Britta's newfound inability to look Duncan in the eye. There was something else, something Jeff hadn't seen in person, and couldn't quite put his finger on just yet. He studied the group carefully analyzed its every move, searched for an answer. Abed would have called it Goldblumming, if Abed had been talking.

It took Jeff longer than he was proud of to realize that was the problem: Abed wasn't talking. Not the way Abed talked, anyways. He was cycling back and forth between making frantic, excited conversation with Hickey, to the exclusion of others in the group, and sitting in dead, anxious silence. His large, dark eyes scanned the room nervously, and his fingers drummed out an erratic rhythm on the table. It was extremely un-Abed-like behavior, and Jeff didn't like it. Abed was supposed to be the eternal constant: having him off-kilter made everything in the room feel off-kilter as well. Jeff couldn't tell if anyone else noticed, but someone had to notice things while Abed wasn't doing it for them.

He caught his friend on the way out the door-in a very literal sense. He had learned the hard way that there was no subtle way to ask Abed to meet him after class, or that they needed to talk, so he took matters into his own hands. And by matters, he meant Abed's arm, which he caught as he was just about to go through the door leading from the library to the corridor.

Abed responded by yowling rather loudly, something Jeff probably should have anticipated as well, in retrospect. Abed didn't like being touched unexpectedly. "Shh! Sorry..." He hissed, glancing down at the slender forearm still clamped in his hand.

That was when he noticed the bruises. Mottled green and purple tones stood out on Abed's wrist in alarming contrast.

"Abed, what the hell happened to your wrist?"

Abed glanced down as if seeing the bruises for the first time. "Oh, nothing," he said, wriggling out of Jeff's grasp.

"Nothing is nothing. That's something. What happened to your wrist?" He didn't grab Abed again (somehow the thought of doing it now made him feel odd and sick), just nodded in the direction of the study room table and went to sit back down, expecting Abed to follow. He did, at a safe distance, and settled himself three times in his chair, as if it had suddenly become foreign to him. That task completed, he wrapped long fingers around the bruise wrist, like he was shielding it, and addressed Jeff.

"You know how sometimes in sitcoms two characters who don't get along are handcuffed together by an authority figure to help them overcome their differences?"

"Yeah..."

"This is nothing like that.

"You know how sometimes a character is handcuffed to the radiator by their friend, to teach them a lesson?"

"Abed, that's not friendship," Jeff wasn't even sure it was a trope.

"Well, it's a little more like that."

The sick feeling returned tenfold, and Jeff slammed a hand, flat-palmed onto the table. "Who did that?" When he got no response, he demanded, "Abed!" at something closer to a shout than he had intended. Abed blinked, and seemed to consider his options.

"I wrecked Hickey's duck cartoons."

"What?"

"I wrecked Hickey's duck cartoons with my Kickpuncher costume. He told me I had to learn the consequences of my actions, so he handcuffed me to a filing cabinet."

It wasn't often that Jeff Winger was at a loss for words, but this more than did the trick. He fixed his gaze just past Abed's shoulder, and the intensity of it could have burned through the wall behind him.

"He did what," the words in no way sound like a question, but Abed repeats himself anyways.

"He told me I had to learn the consequences of my actions, so he handcuffed me to a filing cabinet. He made me miss my movie," he tacked on the ending as if it was the most important part of the story, as if the bruises on his wrist were nothing in comparison to missing a film that had five showings a day.

Jeff leaned forward, his face grim. "Abed. Abed, look at me," he watches Abed's focus shift to somewhere in the middle distance just behind his head. "Abed, look at me. This is important."

Abed's gaze shifted again, to somewhere around Jeff's nose, and he figured that was good as it was going to get.

Jeff inhaled deeply and prepared for a speech that was neither charismatic or inspirational. "Getting handcuffed to a filing cabinet is not a teaching moment. It's not a lesson. It's abuse. You understand that, right?"

Abed cocked his head to the side as if he didn't quite.

"He let me go," he defended half-heartedly, and Jeff realized that as much as Abed didn't like being taken advantage of, he disliked being told about it even less: that the world made a little more sense as long as Hickey was in the right and he was in the wrong. And as long as he didn't get on his bad side again. It explained his passive aggressive clinging to the older man for these past few days.

"It doesn't matter that he let you go," Jeff powered on, because he really felt like he had to. Because Abed needed to learn this stuff before it happened to him again, because he wondered how much time in high school he had spent trailing nervously behind the punks who shoved him into lockers and called it a joke. Also because he was pretty sure if he didn't resolve this when he had the chance, Gobi Nadir would find out and kill him some day, and he would deserve it. "What he did was wrong, and even I'm saying that."

"But we're friends now," Abed says with an uncertain shrug. "Well, we're creative partners. We're going to work together."

"No you're not," Jeff argues furiously. "That's not friendship, that's-that's Stockholm Syndrome. Look at your arm! Friendships aren't about someone causing you a minimum of pain and suffering. Why don't you understand that?"

Abed raised an eyebrow at him, giving him ample time to consider what he just said and feel properly ashamed of it.

"I'm sorry, Abed," Jeff said, properly abashed. He meant it, too, "I just don't want to see you get hurt. Nobody wants that. I mean, think about Troy. If he were here, do you really think he would be okay with this?"

"Troy left because he trusted me to make my own decisions," Abed explored the tender bruises on his wrist.

Jeff leaned back in his chair, willing himself to calm down, "Okay," he said. "You're right," sometimes it was hard to remember that Abed was an adult, but Jeff was willing to acknowledge the necessity of it right now. "But we're not going to sit around and watch you get hurt. We care about you."

"I know," Abed sounded like Han Solo when he said it. He hit a particularly sore spot on his wrist and his eyes narrowed into a cringe.

"And you've been acting like a scared animal ever since this happened. I think you know something's wrong. I want to talk to Hickey about it. Is that-" he hesitated, trying to get something like permission from Abed, "Is that okay with you?"

The corner of his mouth twitched downward for a split second instead, and no one who did not know Abed well would have been able to see little pieces of him starting to crumble. Unfortunately for Jeff he knew Abed.

Something about the way he looked, as defensive as he was scared, reminded Jeff of times he had given these same platitudes to his mother. After all, it was only natural for her to date after his dad left. And it was only natural for her to have a type. She acted like bruises were just an anticipated hazard.

Jeff shuddered, felt something snap shut like a trap.

"I'm going to have a talk with Hickey," he said, standing suddenly. He didn't give Abed time to stop him, but judging by the way he was tracing the same bit of wood grain over and over again in the table with his forefinger, he wasn't planning on arguing, anyways.

Jeff threw his shoulder into the study room door so hard that the rest of the plate glass shivered with impact. He could feel Abed's eyes on him as he left. He barreled down the hall with giant strides, arrived at Hickey's office, and didn't bother to knock on the door.

"Hey!" Hickey hissed indignantly, looking up and, with a swift motion, throwing a stack of ungraded papers over a page of doodles. "What makes you think you can come barging in like that? They give us doors in this place for a reason."

"We need to talk," Jeff responded, ignoring the complaint. He grabbed a rickety looking chair that Hickey probably used for office hours, if anyone in Greendale really upheld office hours (Jeff had the vague idea that he was supposed to, but took the whole concept to be more of a suggestion than an order), and sat down, just close enough to ensure he was invading some sort of implied personal bubble.

"Okay, what's your problem," somehow Hickey's smirk had started to look like a leer. "Trouble with someone in your class?"

"Not exactly," Jeff breathed out furiously. He leaned forward, farther into the personal bubble. "This is about Abed."

Hickey was probably really good at poker. He didn't so much as blink. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Really? Because Abed's got a ring of bruises around his wrist that I don't think he put there himself, and I would be more than happy to give your matching set," he wasn't sure how much of what he was saying was for some thirteen year old version of himself and how much was for Abed, but either way it felt pretty good.

"Are you trying to intimidate me, Mr. Winger? Do you know what my job was?"

"Yeah, I know. So what I want to know now is where the hell you think you get off playing Bad Cop to a kid who's spent most of his life getting shoved into lockers?"

Hickey had the nerve to roll his eyes, and Jeff felt his blood boil, "Don't act like I was trying to kill the kid, I just-I needed to teach him about respect. You and your group treat him like he's a time bomb, and I'm the kind of person who thinks he's gotten a little too comfortable with it. I taught him a lesson, and he'll probably film one of his little movies about it, no harm no foul."

"Excuse me, was I not clear enough about the bruises on his wrist?"

"He struggled a little," Hickey stared at him evenly.

"He could sue, you know, and probably have a damn good case. You really think that's going to save Greendale?"

"This wasn't about saving Greendale. It was about teaching him some manners."

"And that's how you do it? Like you're interrogating a murderer on a cop show? You of all people should know that physical abuse doesn't lead to admissable evidence," the legal jargon fell out his mouth in a way that felt familiar and almost pleasant.

"I guess it's a good thing I wasn't looking for evidence, then. Besides, I must have done something to get on his good side, he can't get enough of me now."

"You think that's what friendship and respect is, coming from Abed? You think that's how he treats his friends? It's not," Jeff didn't add that he knew this because he remembered something like that deer-in-the-headlights look Abed wore these days from the early weeks of their friendship. "He's not your friend. He's afraid of you," Jeff stood, and towered over Hickey for a moment, all anger and righteous indignance. "And if I ever hear of this happening again, you should probably be afraid of me," he turned and strode out, slamming the door behind him.

When he returned to the study room Abed was still there, looking duly concerned. His hand was still draped protectively over his bruised wrist, and Jeff grimaced. "He's not going to bother you anymore," he said, sitting heavily in his chair.

"Cool," Abed shot back quietly. "Cool cool cool."

"Let me take a look at your wrist."

Abed shuffled his chair until he was close enough to offer his arm. The way he shied away from touch (moreso than was usual for Abed), suggested that a damaged wrist was the least of the damage.

Jeff bit viciously at his lower lip, deep in thought, as he explored the bruises as gently as possible. "And if he does bother you again, let me know and I'll kill him, okay?"

Abed didn't respond.


End file.
